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Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes with some concerning news from the Atlantic. From the article: "In a secret test of mass surveillance technology, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department sent a civilian aircraft over Compton, California, capturing high-resolution video of everything that happened inside that 10-square-mile municipality. Compton residents weren't told about the spying, which happened in 2012. 'We literally watched all of Compton during the times that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people,' Ross McNutt of Persistence Surveillance Systems told the Center for Investigative Reporting, which unearthed and did the first reporting on this important story. The technology he's trying to sell to police departments all over America can stay aloft for up to six hours. Like Google Earth, it enables police to zoom in on certain areas. And like TiVo, it permits them to rewind, so that they can look back and see what happened anywhere they weren't watching in real time."

I can see how this might work against somebody stealing a car as it is something that can be relatively easy to track. But tracking a person as they go into the subway is difficult or if somebody is wearing a hoodie [independent.ie]. It still wouldn't touch the big players in organized or white collar crime.

That naturally brings to mind Travon/Zimmerman. Had their been infrared aerial surveillance of that scene then better evidence would have been available to the jury about exactly who was closing to engage with whom that night.

Hoddie or not.

No, this is not advocacy for surveilling everything, but the "hoddie" argument is weak and poor arguments need to be avoided. The statists will get their way anyhow, but we don't need to make it easy for them.

The criminal street culture already dresses the same as each other as a means of making identification (eye witness and video) more difficult.

The company that provided this "service" has sample photos and videos online. It's mostly ants marching over blobs... At the best resolutions, you can tell a car from a mini-van, and a truck from an SUV. Telling one person from another would be impossible. At best, you could follow a bank robber's get-away car.

It is easy to identify those ants later if you are the police. Just wait until they pass some CCTV and go get the footage. See what building they came out of, or what car they were in (which was picked up by automatic number-plate recognition).

Consider the fuel costs alone to keep such a system running. Then consider something else that isn't getting funding.Is this thing really going to provide much benefit for all the resources required to put into it?

The cost is far lower per hour than a single officer walking the beat. Considering a small Cessna burns 6 gallons per hour or so, at roughly $6 a gallon currently thats 36 hours or so in fuel costs... this thing is going to burn a gallon for 6 hours, or less. Less stringent safety requirements also bring the cost of maintaining the thing down to near that of a motorcycle (lower than a patrol car). Any cop you get to walk around compton will cost far more in hazard pay alone, its a fucking war zone.

Cost of a pilot maybe 50% more than a beat cop, but able to cover the area of 20.

Aircraft maintenance for a UAV thats not doing high stress maneuvers? A few thousand bucks every six months... if you're maintaining an Airworthiness certificate as you would on a standard passenger aircraft.

Hopefully, everyone involved with the Sheriff's department will be punished as hard as legally possible and possibly harder; but that seems unlikely to change the fact that 'power we could use' turns into 'power we just did use' with unpleasant regularity, and it's only reasonable to suspect that the cost of this sort of sensors-and-analysis package is only going to continue plummeting.

I'm sure that the insufferable 'if, hypothetically speaking, this level of surveillance would be legal if carried out by a magical force of zero-cost police officers with perfect memories and no need for sleep, it must be legal if carried out by any means whatsoever!' brigade will be by shortly; but their argument is ahistorical nonsense that ignores the real issue: most of your protection has always been logistical rather than legal. Now we are substantially reducing the logistical barriers and can reasonably expect to further reduce them in the near future. Any protections that you think would be a good idea will soon need to be explicitly legal; because the logistics will be increasingly trivial(possibly even self-financing, if you can sell ads somehow...)

punished for... what? for looking at stuff that is outside in plain view from the sky?

For conducting mass surveillance of public places, which is absolutely 100% different from someone merely seeing you, and especially so when something as powerful as the government does it. The problem is a combination of them recording footage and doing so for huge areas. I don't think I even need to explain how this is different from using your eyes to look around.

You cannot seriously have an issue with the collection of such freely available imagery.

I do. Especially when it's the government doing it. We The People can easily restrict their activities if we choose to do so. The fact that "anybody" can do it doesn't mean we should let the government, with its virtually limitless resources and authority, do so.

What can the police do these days? Automatic license plate scanning? Red Light cameras? Automated Speed cameras? How about a FLIR camera on a helicopter?

I think that's all morally wrong. The fact that we allow it means we're not living up to the whole "land of the free and the home of the brave" thing.

I'll yield to them public places.. maybe... the problem is their recordings don't even exclude private property. How about... no surveillance of any private places or of public spaces that includes incidental coverage of any private space, without prior express written revokable permission from all property owners and any lawful residents (or rental tenants) freely and voluntarily granted with no order, reward, or coercion, or in exces

You cannot seriously have an issue with the collection of such freely available imagery.

What do you think the limit should be?

On the government's use of surveillance technology in public places.

Ok, where I agree that is a clear line, I don't agree with where you draw it.

Personally, I'm OK with automated surveillance in public places, including video, audio, imagery and even automated interpretation of same. But there should be limits to the use of such collections as evidence as follows:

1. Retention of collected data should be time limited, unless being used as evidence in an specific case.

2. Once the delete date has been reached, it cannot be used as evidence in any other criminal case that ma

ANYBODY flying over this area can take pictures, video etc. Is it somehow a problem because the police do it?

Actually, yes -- there are limits to the power of public figures because they also have the ability to abuse said power. If you give someone whose mandate is to enforce the law (catch people doing bad things) the ability to surveil public spaces and review every aspect of that space at any time, you're changing the social contract with law enforcement from how it is currently accepted.

Of course, in reality, this would save money/taxes, resulting in a smaller arrest/fine quota needed, so the smaller police

Point me to a law where this is illegal. Police agencies have used helicopters for decades, and the Supreme court has thrown out evidence if there wasn't probably cause to look over a fence. There is some semblance of balance.

The local ghetto bird flies over our house several times a week on it's way to and fro whatever it's going to and fro from. There is nothing today that doesn't prevent that helicopter from having a camera on it. Oh wait.. it does. It has even shown it's very bright light into our ba

Either police looking at stuff even when no crime has been reported is wrong, or it isn't.

You make a valid point that the technical method used isn't the important aspect, but then go off on some unrelated tangets. I don't think anyone has said, or implied, that the legality of the thing the police see defines whether seeing it was right or wrong, it's a strawman position that you set up to knock down.

You imply a camera on a plane is no worse than a camera on a corner. It's as rediculous as saying that f

"“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,”[The supervisor of the project at the sheriff's department Sgt. Douglas] Iketani said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”

That is...not exactly... the sort of attitude you want somebody with access to legalized violence to operate under. 'Yeah, we knew people wouldn't like the idea, so we just did it secretly instead. Listening to complaints is a total pain in the ass.' That alone strikes me as reason enough to clean house of everyone who gave it their approval, regardless of whether I thought the project was a good idea or not.

This particular case was kept secret, but there is a NOVA episode about something similar being done in a DC suburb. They kept a drone aloft for a month recording literally everything that happened in a small city (well, everything visible from the air). The camera was wide-field high-resolution, so you could crop and zoom any part of the video and get an image comparable to what you might see on a news camera from a helicopter zoomed in. They recorded a whole month, so you could go back and look at what

They had (maybe still have) an ARGUS-IS unit puttering around in the vicinity of Quantico, VA for a while, for, um, demonstration purposes only, I'm sure. Now, I suspect that an ARGUS-IS deployment has a price tag that would make the folks at Persistent Surveillance Systems look like a hobby aircraft; but the performance is... impressive.

I suspect that, aside from basic technological advance, it really doesn't help that the Iraq and Afghanistan markets are winding down a bit, so assorted stuff for huntin

but that seems unlikely to change the fact that 'power we could use' turns into 'power we just did use' with unpleasant regularity

Their whole job is dealing with people who do crime and ask for forgiveness later. I don't condone what they are doing, but I can see how they could slip in that direction.

Which is why we have this thing called the United States Constitution, and why that constitution has an amendment (the 4th one, in fact) that deals with this sort of thing. That same constitution also has a concept of separation of powers, and defines what branch of government has what power. Law enforcement (under the executive branch) are only doing half of their job - they're sworn to uphold the law but the are ignoring the highest law, the constitution The judicial branch exists to prevent that, but they don't seem to be very good at doing the part of their job that involves upholding the constitution.

Make note that all that was seen was in public view. Should we have laws that make it illegal to look down from a plane or balloon or whatever? I do think that due to technology being so able to catch people that people had better plan on being far more honest than in the past. And there are upsides to all of this. Eventually the bad guys will realize that they will be quickly caught when they commit crimes. Perhaps we are entering an era in which crime will be impossible.

Meh, not to worry, as soon as those dopey cops realise they were spying on themselves more than anyone else and excuses about it not being turned on wont work, they'll drop the idea, especially as most of their criminal activities do take place in public spaces.

I believe it was titled "Government Surveillance" or something like that. The two sides debated: Law enforcement said its "good" and they would never abuse this data. Stanford ethicists and the EFF argued that its "bad" and its already being abused by law enforcement's flagrant disregard of the Constitution. Interestingly, the arguments were moot since law enforcement complained that the detail resolution of the images were not good enough to justify the costs in terms of actual prosecutions. In other w

especially because its hard to ID a perpetrator from above the top of their head.

That's why we need to outlaw hair and head wear. It will be in the best interests of public safety if everyone had a prominent barcode tattooed to the top of their clean shaven, bald head to aid in identification by Law Enforcement surveillance drones.

TFS said they used an "aircraft", which I guess means "airplane". We better watch out - next thing you know, the sheriff's office will have helicopters and be able to hover, watching someone for a while. With an airplane, they can only watch for a couple minutes before they've flown by.

Not helicopters. They are too expensive. Quadcopter drones possibly. Or areostats. Or blimps. There are lots of choices, each has its advantages and disadvantages. But a robot eye-in-the-sky doesn't need to be very big or support a lot of weight...or be very expensive.

Doesn't even need to be that. Most public streets have municipal lampposts at convenient intervals, 30+ feet tall and fairly well immune to tampering (being too tall and too slick to climb easily), that can provide an excellent and permanent vantage point at minimal expense... and quite possibly without anyone noticing, if cameras are installed to look like part of the existing streetlight and as part of "routine maintenance".

TFS said they used an "aircraft", which I guess means "airplane". We better watch out - next thing you know, the sheriff's office will have helicopters and be able to hover, watching someone for a while. With an airplane, they can only watch for a couple minutes before they've flown by.

The difference was that in the past they'd have to spend $5-10k and then they can watch one person for a period of an hour or two. Now they can spend $100/day and record everybody in a whole town, without targeting anybody in particular.

This isn't a camera with a zoom lens. This is a high-resolution wide-field camera, that effectively behaves like it is zoomed in on everybody everywhere at the same time.

I'm sorry, but I guess I don't understand why this is any bigger deal than cameras on a street corner. Maybe it's having grown up in Baltimore with a police helicopter constantly overhead that's desensitized me.

Doesn't everyone just assume that when in public, everything you do could be observed by someone else? Now, if they were looking in people's windows, that would be a bit creepier.

If you're in your backyard with a 12 foot private fence, you're not in public but you're visible from the sky. There's also a difference from being temporally observed by someone and having the government watching you.

This system is going to see plenty of things that aren't "in public", even without peeping in windows. What is your expectation of privacy in your backyard? Could there be a constitutional up-side in the US though? Maybe everyone will be able to have their cases thrown out due to the warrantless surveillance conducted on them prior to their arrest.

The legal issues have already been well explored by the Courts. "But the pilot is remote/robotic" is just like "on the internet," it is not an impressive distinction. The drug was had the Courts already deciding that the cops can fly around and arrest you from whatever is in plain view from above, but they can't deploy technology such as IR (without a warrant) to detect indoor pot growers.

There is no warrant required in the US for "surveillance," only for "searches." It isn't a "search" unless it can detect

This seems like a general warrant to me. For civilian aircraft, there are minimum altitudes, and no general expectation of privacy from overhead observation at that distance. But in this case, this is for the purpose of gathering evidence. How is that not a general warrant?

I imagine the only thing keeping it from going mainstream is the ability to make sure it doesn't record any pesky illegal/immoral activity by police/upper government officials. Kind of like that license plat reader system that was suspended indefinitely in Boston because a reporter was able to get a severely limited dataset from the system and still find "mistakes" (ignoring a stolen motorcycle that went past the same intersection regularly while using the system primarily to write tickets, ignoring the most dense area for overdue tickets the police employee parking lot, etc). Or like all of those police dash cams that have a tendency to have malfunctions/accidents when they might have caught "misconduct" (Hollywood Florida framing, Michael DeHerra Beating, Mark Byrge Arrest,Anthony Warren beating & the Prince George’s County, Maryland incident where SEVEN dashcams "malfunctioned" at once.)

If we decide not to allow the public to fly drones around peeping into back yards, the same should apply to the police (without a warrant). The limits on casual/easy police surveillance should be pretty much the same as the limits on the public. The police should be no more than citizens that we have authorized to act in our name.

That said, it may be time to be realistic, that technology is expanding our powers of easy observation beyond historical limits. Create new laws regulating personal and commercial drone camera use, including allowable flight altitudes, linger times, recording and viewing resolutions, etc under various circumstances - with the same standards governing police use without a warrant. Balance new benefits against the loss of a few old privacy benefits. Same goes for things like Google Glass.

The key is to avoid allowing politicians to carve out any special exceptions/powers exclusively for the police - insist that police powers be based on those of the general public.

Actually, considering how profitable are the side bits (eg. classes that 'sex offenders' must attend, amounting to thousands of dollars for the court system at no particular risk or expense to LE), it wouldn't surprise me at all if this sort of thing began happening.

Depends on where you live. Around the corner from my friends house there was a guy who went through a tough divorce. He would lay naked on a lounge chair, drinking, in full view of his neighbors and anyone in the bay as his house was on the water. Neighbors called the cops who told them he is on his own private property and they could do nothing about it. Either they didn't want to take the call or it was true. This is on Long Island in Nassau County so YMMV.

You do something the government doesn't like, and they'll use their ubiquitous surveillance to track everything you do in public places (If this trend continues, they'll have surveillance devices everywhere.). If you make even the slightest mistake, they'll have cause to harass you or ruin your reputation. And remember that laws don't have to be just, so even if the 'mistake' is illegal, that doesn't mean what you did is immoral.

Doctoring the footage could prove to be another problem. It certainly wouldn't

It doesn't matter if they don't like it. So long as it's legal, they can't do anything about it.

Just like the NSA surveillance doesn't exist? Just like the TSA, free speech zones, DUI checkpoints, stop-and-frisk, etc. don't exist? The government doesn't have to follow the laws, and especially when they're allowed to act in secret. They have enough resources to cover everything up, harass people, and ruin reputations. An example of this would be the surveillance of MLK, which was targeted. Only, this sort of technology would expand the scope of it and give them more power.

Your argument makes as much sense as banning guns and knives because they have been used to commit murders.

The TSA operates within private boundaries. They can have whatever rules they want.

Fucking bullshit. The TSA is a government agency. Just because it operates within "private boundaries" doesn't mean government thugs can violate people's constitutional rights, or are moral in doing so. It's people like you that we have to thank for the erosion of our individual liberties; I'm sick of you fools.

Ever hear of "No shoes, no shirt, no service"?

Ever heard of the constitution? Obviously not.

NSA surveillance is a completely different issue. They are under scrutiny for spying on peoples' private lives, not recording lawfully in public.

Lawful != moral.

If this experiment had involved flying drones up to windows or using x-rays to spy inside of houses, I would then have a problem with it.

Of course, because then the privacy you care about would be violated; that's what counts.

If I state that you cannot enter my house or business unless you allow me to search you first, then you either allow the search or you stay out. It's your choice and no rights are being violated.

And if you're the government, then rights *would* be violated. See the difference? It has to do with who's doing it.

But hey, let's just have the government molest people who want to get on trains, buses, or boats. Let's expand the TSA, since that's what they want, anyway. That would be okay, since people could just choose not to use planes, trains, buses, or boats. The availability of 'choice' ("choice" meaning that the government creates a law that says that either you have to let government thugs molest p

Persistent Surveillance Systems [persistent...llance.com] is a company that was demoing this technology to the LAPD. They -- private company -- put their planes in the air to try to sell this technology to the LAPD.

Yeah, but theym biatches in Compton aint goin nowhere, Nosiree.Them officers gonna rub they crotches and hit rewind again and again watchin Chantee goin down on that guy in the alley....Then they jus say it sugar stains from donuts on they britches.You watchn see ifn what I say aint right!

They already have. [wikipedia.org]. We have the KKK to thank for that precedent, but it would have happened anyway with protests.

Of course, it's not always good idea to wear masks at protests anyway: agent provocateurs can easily infiltrate, start violence, and then give the police an excuse to shut it down. Needless to say, anti-mask laws don't apply to police.

You assume that it will be easy to detect who they are, or that your footage will not be vanished. Furthermore, public opinion and laws will not always be on your side. Privacy (in this case, from mass government surveillance) is still very useful, and for me, desirable.

Privacy in public is a contradiction so there is no point throwing a tantrum over it.

Privacy from *mass government surveillance of public places* is not a contradiction. Guess how we can prevent it, while still having public places? Simply put, we can simply restrict the government's usage of surveillance devices in public p

Banning "the government" from surveillance would also ban regular people from recording in public, otherwise a government agency could simply have someone working with them, a contractor perhaps, do the recording.

Simply incorrect. Governments have far more resources with which to make use of surveillance devices, so prohibiting them from doing so would help. Furthermore, all their footage goes to one central authority (the government), while they would have to hunt down other people's footage.

As for hiring people, doing so in such ways could also be made illegal. After all, something doesn't become okay just because you hire people to do it.

I'd also love to see how they would "vanish" my footage when it's stored in numerous places around the world.

How would I know how you personally choose to store your footage? I'm not ta

Who hires the contractors? The government. The government's ability to hire contractors for certain purposes can be restricted.

And when the government hires contractors to do something (such as to violate people's rights), the contractors become a de facto part of the government. Otherwise, they'd just be able to hire contractors to do *anything* they're not allowed to do, constitutionally or otherwise.

Except taking footage in public does not violate anyone's rights, no matter how much you wish it did.

Just because the government doesn't acknowledge certain rights, that doesn't mean that people don't believe they should have them, and that it's wrong when the government violates these not-yet-implemented rights. But yeah, I do believe in privacy from mass government surveillance of public places.

Also, I said "such as," meaning it was an *example*. Using the above person's logic, contractors would be able to do *anything* the government couldn't do, which would be insane. That was the point, and it wasn't

Well then you better start freaking out about the police helicopters and dashcams.

What part of "mass surveillance" do you people not understand? A few dashcams do not cover the same ground as (for example) cameras installed everywhere in public places. Helicopters are prohibitively expensive, but if they became cheap and automated, such surveillance would become a problem.

I don't care what you think.

Considering you're telling me how I think, I would think you would care how I actually think. Or are you more concerned about what goes on in your own delusions?

Having dozens or hundreds of officers patrolling around, recording at all hours qualifies as mass surveillance. Stop being so dense.

Actually, no, it doesn't. Having thousands of cheap cameras, which can record footage (Big difference here!) and send that footage to a central authority, and never have to sleep, is absolutely different, and qualifies as mass surveillance. Having that many officers for the sole purpose of surveillance is also cost prohibitive, so they'd never be able to replace even cheap surveillance devices.

Privacy in public is a contradiction
Yeah, if you believe privacy only equals physical privacy, which is ignorant - protip: Privacy != just physical, you have privacy of mind and thought - somebody asks you for your opinion on something for example, you need not say it, so IMO "privacy in public places doesn't exist" is only true if talking PHYSICAL privacy - without that quantifier, this is a bullshit notion, IMO

No, it's much, much worse; it's made up of normal people who are given authorities that normal people don't have. Power corrupts. The government is not made up of perfect angels who cannot make mistakes or abuse their powers, but normal people. That is a big part of the problem. You would do well to remember this.

Re What did governments get from harassing MLK, OWS, anti-war protestors, or any of the other hundreds of millions of people that were abused by governments throughout history?
Thats the fun next step. With tech like this you get every licence plate, passengers face, drivers face 24/7, cell numbers called, cell phone details in any area depending on a few main roads in and out of a community, protest area or meeting.
Private/public CCTV network sharing fills in more gaps.
Then the State or Federal gov ca

Shining a laser pointer at a drone with a camera is pretty stupid.Unless you've got an automated tracking system to keep the laser pointed exactly at the moving target until it is out of sight, you've just painted a huge target on yourself and committed a crime to give them legal means to track your current and future movements until you're apprehended.

As seen with a few murder cases recently where people were caught on camera it just means you can do something after the event. Electronic eyes are no replacement for boots on the ground. They are a suppliment.